Because Dinner Matters

Chocolate-Dipped Treats

This holiday season, my family decided to complement our usual teacher gifts of homemade granola & Starbucks gift cards with some easy-peasy “homemade” chocolate dipped treats. The lineup? Pretzels, Potato Chips and Candied Ginger. The process? 3 steps, 5minutes, simple as pie. The result? So good we ate the first batch and will have to recreate for gift-giving 🙂

Just follow these simple steps…

1. Melt Chocolate.
You have two decisions to make here. The first decision is which chocolate(s) to use – we did some milk, some dark and some white, all using Ghirardelli chocolate chips which I find to be great value (high quality and reasonable price). It is nice to have at least two kinds of chocolate for variety of taste and visual appeal, and for the ability to add “stripes” of contrasting chocolate.

The next decision is how to melt your chocolate, there are two methods:

Double Boiler Method: Place a metal bowl with chocolate chips in it over a pot of water, bring water to a boil , and chocolate will melt. (Never put chocolate in a pan directly on stovetop, it’s much too hot). I prefer this one because I always lean towards stovetop over microwave when given a choice.

Microwave Method: Place chips in a microwave-safe bowl and run at medium-high heat in 30 second bursts, stirring after each. You may need to stir in a dash of canola oil between microwave bursts when using this method if things get stiff (that will depend on which chips you use).

2. Dip your items in the chocolate.
There are lots of options for how to do this so have fun… here are some we tried

Full-dip (see pretzels and potato chips photos) – best to use tongs

Half-dip (see some of the potato chips and all the candied ginger, so pretty!) – hands work well for this method

Full-dip + stripes of contrasting chocolate – use a spoon to drizzle the swirls on top

Half-dip + same chocolate swirls on the other half

Add some sprinkles on top while the chocolate is still warm (we dusted pretzels with bits of peppermint candy canes….)

3. Place the items on wax paper or parchment paper and pop into the fridge to cool and firm up.
Then wrap into air-tight containers and store in your fridge for up to a week (ours did not last nearly that long!)

Here at Gatheredtable, We always evaluate our recipes with “ROI” in mind – meaning that the outcome has to be worth the effort and expense to make it… We deemed these chocolate dipped treats very high ROI – easy, homemade fun! (However we also tried homemade peppermint bark… and without going into the whole story of that failure, suffice it to say that we determined that you’re better off buying it at Trader Joe’s – too hard and expensive to be worth it!)

What else have you dipped in chocolate? Or what other ideas for homemade holiday treats do you have? Drop us a note and let us know!